Collaboration is and will be a hot topic in business for a while.  In the eLearning industry, collaboration works when the act of collaboration simplifies the life of the stakeholders involved.

Three reasons collaboration works for eLearning projects:

• Knowledge mining:  especially for large organizations, geographically spread, getting most experts aligned on content is critical.  If localization to other languages is part of the scope, even more essential collaboration will be.  Another important element is that stakeholders feel involved in the process and are partially “owners” of the content so that they won’t “reject” it in the future.

• Development:  Content on local hard drives and even sent by FTP are becoming less popular.  Collaboration that integrates media management in the cloud is becoming more and more popular because wait times and transfer times trend to zero.  A centralized, consistent repository is desirable.

• Approval: Very hard not to have lots of stakeholders wanting to add or delete or improve content.  The key is to make these changes in real time.  Going from discussion to change to finished product in real time.  The discussion-edit-review process will likely loop a few times, so even more critical is to have the technology and methods to collaborate in real time to accomplish these loops as quickly as possible.